We rely, in this world, on the visual aspects of humanity as a means of learning who we are. This, Ralph Ellison argues convincingly, is a dangerous habit. A classic from the moment it first appeared in 1952, Invisible Man chronicles the travels of its narrator, a young, nameless black man, as he moves through the hellish levels of American intolerance and cultural blindness. Searching for a context in which to know himself, he exists in a very peculiar state. "I am an invisible man," he says in his prologue. "When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination--indeed, everything and anything except me." But this is hard-won self-knowledge, earned over the course of many years.

As the book gets started, the narrator is expelled from his Southern Negro college for inadvertently showing a white trustee the reality of black life in the south, including an incestuous farmer and a rural whorehouse. The college director chastises him: "Why, the dumbest black bastard in the cotton patch knows that the only way to please a white man is to tell him a lie! What kind of an education are you getting around here?" Mystified, the narrator moves north to New York City, where the truth, at least as he perceives it, is dealt another blow when he learns that his former headmaster's recommendation letters are, in fact, letters of condemnation.

What ensues is a search for what truth actually is, which proves to be supremely elusive. The narrator becomes a spokesman for a mixed-race band of social activists called "The Brotherhood" and believes he is fighting for equality. Once again, he realizes he's been duped into believing what he thought was the truth, when in fact it is only another variation. Of the Brothers, he eventually discerns: "They were blind, bat blind, moving only by the echoed sounds of their voices. And because they were blind they would destroy themselves.... Here I thought they accepted me because they felt that color made no difference, when in reality it made no difference because they didn't see either color or men."

Invisible Man is certainly a book about race in America, and sadly enough, few of the problems it chronicles have disappeared even now. But Ellison's first novel transcends such a narrow definition. It's also a book about the human race stumbling down the path to identity, challenged and successful to varying degrees. None of us can ever be sure of the truth beyond ourselves, and possibly not even there. The world is a tricky place, and no one knows this better than the invisible man, who leaves us with these chilling, provocative words: "And it is this which frightens me: Who knows but that, on the lower frequencies, I speak for you?" --Melanie Rehak

Invisible Man is a milestone in American literature, a book that has continued to engage readers since its appearance in 1952.  A first novel by an unknown writer, it remained on the bestseller list for sixteen weeks, won the National Book Award for fiction, and established Ralph Ellison as one of the key writers of the century.  The nameless narrator of the novel describes growing up in a black community in the South, attending a Negro college from which he is expelled, moving to New York and becoming the chief spokesman of the Harlem branch of "the Brotherhood", and retreating amid violence and confusion to the basement lair of the Invisible Man he imagines himself to be.  The book is a passionate and witty tour de force of style, strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Joyce, and Dostoevsky.

Once I opened the book and read the first page, I was confused and my mind was in a tangled web for I could not understand some of the writing and diction Ralph Ellison chose to use. This was a tough book for me to read because of that, but overall, the story was just okay.

I did learn more about how discrimination and racism really affected those of color, but it was nothing I hadn't heard before. There was no excitement from the beginning through to the end and I started to lose interest as the story dragged itself out. Nothing grasped my attention or made me want to keep reading so that contributed to even more confusion and boredom.

Ralph Ellison did a good job by transferring real life situations into the life of the narrator. These situations seemed believable and brutal, just like life was for those of color back in the 1900's. What I didn't like about the story was how confusing the concepts were about the Brotherhood. I don't know anything about this and I got angry very easily by trying to interpret everything. I would definitely not recommend this book, or at least I wouldn't to a seventeen year old in an English class.

A MUST READ! This book is very deep; I read it twice. Read this book for it's deeper meaning.

"I am an invisible man," begins Ralph Ellison's classic-for-a-reason novel. In its beginning, the story is already at its end, inside the mind of its unnamed narrator after he has undergone enlightenment. In the rest of the book, he shows how he came to live "outside of history."

In each chapter, the narrator experiences humiliation, [...], and self-delusion. At some points, as a reader, I wanted to shake him. This story of waking up takes awhile, but Ellison's examples of life's "beautiful absurdities" require the reader to become as beaten down as the narrator.

A novel that has often been voted the most influential of the twentieth-century doesn't need me to recommend it. But you might particularly like Invisible Man if you enjoy Catch-22, Joyce, or James Baldwin.

"The Invisible Man" is a classic novel which uses the first person narrator, the invisible man, to move the reader through various types of racism, dishonesty, and deceptiveness which a black man in the 1950's would encounter. The more the invisible man is used by others, the more invisible he becomes and the less self-identity he possesses. He allows himself, unwittingly, to be used by others, both black and white, for their own purposes. He gains nothing from dealing with these characters and actually loses more and more of his self-worth, thus creating his invisibility as a person. It is only when he begins to realize that he must define his own self-worth and not allow others to dictate to him or define his identity that his "invisibility" begins to diminish. The idea that "white is right, white has might", symbolized by the paint factory, was the ideology of those times. Segregation was practiced and blacks were looked down upon as ignorant, nameless members of the American culture. They were invisible citizens in a white-dominated culture. The author wanted to send the message to readers that America was founded upon the philosophy of individual freedom in all areas and that nothing was gained by forcing people to conform to society's standards. By conforming, individual identity is lost and invisibility as a person increases. "I am not invisible that nobody can see me. I am invisible because they choose not to see me." That was the truth the invisible man finally learned. From that truth, he was able to begin defining his own identity and not be the invisible man in his own eyes.

This novel is a classic and a must read for any one, especially any American, of any color, race, or religion. Although it was written several decades ago, much of it still applies today.